Rules of engagement: 1) You do not have to register to leave comments on this blog. 2) I do not respond to anonymous comments. 3) I reserve the right to delete defamatory, racist, sexist or anti-gay comments. 4) I delete advertisements that slip thru the google spam folder as I see fit.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

I appreciate, like all charities, that you need to raise funds for your undoubtedly charitable and important work.

However, what an earth drove you to send me a big fundraising envelope that is filled with electronic garbage? So, you send me a pen, something apparently necessary to complete your fundraising form with financial details. Fair enough, though, I suspect that most people who have the funds to donate to you probably own a pen.

But you did not stop there, you also included an oversized electronic calculator, wrapped in plastic bubble to protect it. That's where the fun stops! N O B O D Y uses electronic calculators as stand-alone utilities. We have them in our smartphones, on our computers, even on our smart watches. Have you given any thought on the environmental impact of the electronic garbage that you sent out en masse to the unsuspecting public? I won't use it, most of us will have zero use for that piece of plastic and the toxic battery inside it.

I won't be donating a cent to you, because it is clear to me that you are wasting without much thinking oodles of $$ to fill thick envelopes with garbage that you then send to people like me with requests for donations. How stupid do you think we are?

I love the line in your letter where you ask that we please do not return your electronic garbage back to sender, instead begging that we please unload the trash you sent our way 'to a friend of relative who may enjoy it'. Who are you kidding?

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

I published in 2015 an Editorial in Bioethics where I took the stance that we have no good ethical reasons to accommodate conscientious objectors in medicine in liberal democracies. That Editorial led to a bit of a splash among religious activists who liberally make use of conscientious objection accommodation afforded to them in order to avoid providing professional services to patients. There has also been a more considered reply by Christopher Cowley that was published in Bioethics. Julian Savulescu, the Editor of the Journal of medical ethics was another target of Cowley's reply. Julian and I have finally got around to writing a reply to Cowley. It's forthcoming in Bioethics (as an Editor of the journal, I was, of course, not involved in the decision-making process on that manuscript). Look out for it, it's gone into production. The title of our paper: Doctors have no right to refuse medical assistance in dying, abortion or contraception.

The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs produced a new opinion on conscientious objection. The Journal of Clinical Ethics organised a symposium with replies to that document. My paper titled Conscientious objection accommodation in medicine: Private ideological convictions must not trump professional obligations is scheduled for publication in that journal this fall. Check it out.

Last but not least, Ricardo Smalling and I had a lengthier review piece in the Journal of medical ethics on conscientious objection. Check it out here. You won't be surprised by its title, I suspect: Why medical professionals have no moral claim to conscientious objection accommodation in liberal democracies. The journal apparently received a couple of responses and so we're currently busy drafting a response to those.

The Journal of medical ethics as well as the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics are currently in the process of putting out special issues dedicated to the conscientious objection problem. Look out for that forthcoming content.

Why is there this sudden flurry of publications and special journal issues on this subject matter? I think it has mostly to do with the fact that conscientious objectors make reliable service delivery ever more difficult with their accommodation demands. Court challenges are under way in Canada where Christian doctors demand to be accommodated in the country's coming medical aid in dying regime. They even refuse to transfer assistance-seeking eligible patients to colleagues who would provide the medical services that these patients would be entitled to receive. It cannot surprise, seeing such unprofessional conduct, that bioethicists the world all over have become interested in this issue again.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

It is truly remarkable how radically Western societies were remade
by the baby boomer generation. They campaigned for the decriminalisation of
abortion and succeeded in most liberal democracies. As Carole Levine rightly
notes, ‘the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a frontline attack on
(the) patriarchal and authoritarian model’ of decision-making in the medical
profession.[1]
Baby boomers also campaigned for the decriminalisation of same sex acts and
eventually brought us marriage equality, even in a country as conservative as
the United States. They campaigned for the decriminalisation of (soft) drugs
and we are beginning to see increasing numbers of jurisdictions dabbling in the
decriminalisation of at least cannabis. This, of course, is also partly due to
the failure of the war against drugs. Restrictive drug legislation is reportedly
responsible for about 5 billion people’s lack of end-of-life access to opioids
across the globe.[2]

With baby boomers being anywhere between 52 and 70 years of
age, invariably the end of life is coming into focus for an increasing number
of people belonging to this generation. They would have seen parents and
relatives suffering often terribly at the hands of a medical system that
ignored their end-of-life choices in favour of life support at nearly all cost.
Even today about 35% of patients who are at the end of the life receive
non-beneficial medical care, including care that will result in a deterioration
of their quality of life, such as, for instance, radiotherapy and dialysis.[3]
Bioethicists have long proposed a patient focused approach to these kinds of
challenges. Robert Veatch, for instance, noted that ‘the arrogance of the
medical professional claiming that he or she (mostly ‘he’) had the authority to
decide, even against a patient’s wishes, what was best for the patient was
morally indefensible. Physicians were deciding not only that continued
torturous life-support was in a dying person’s best interest, but that the
physician’s ‘order’ justified continued infliction of that torture. That ethic seemed so wrong, so contrary to
any moral decency, that it was only natural to challenge it in the name of
patient rights.’[4]

It is not terribly surprising, with baby boomer finding
themselves – perhaps to their greatest surprise - at the levers of power of the
system that they rebelled against in the 1960s and 1970s, that the number of
jurisdictions that have decriminalised assisted dying is steadily increasing. Many
legislators and judges are baby boomers. Just like baby boomers fought hard for
the right to live their life by their own lights, they were bound not to hand
control over to others when it came to their own dying. Their own foreseeable
demise has clearly focused minds in many a jurisdiction and highest court room.
The debates about supposedly significant moral distinctions between active
forms of assisted dying and letting die – never an ethically plausible
distinction to begin with - seem to have quietly faded away in favour of
respect for considered patient choice. Today’s debates focus on the potential
for abuse affecting disabled people and vague others labelled ‘vulnerable’ by
those campaigning against medical aid in dying. Where you stand on these
questions is not that significant as they will be settled by empirical evidence
that is accumulating rapidly in the increasing number of jurisdictions that are
decriminalising medical aid in dying in different forms and shapes. As I write this
the Canadian parliament voted in favor of legislation that would make
euthanasia and assisted suicide available to competent terminally ill patients.
The availability of legal access to euthanasia is a first in North America. The
state of California passed assisted suicide legislation a few months ago. It
came into effect in June 2016. Access to assisted suicide in California is
limited to terminally ill patients. Similar efforts are underway in a number of
other states in the USA. France decided, also in 2016, to introduce a terminal
sedation regime for eligible patients. Step by step baby boomers successfully wrestle(d)
away control over our dying from the medical profession and restrictive
legislation.

The next frontier for our baby boomer legislators and
judges, undoubtedly, will be the issue of scope, when it comes to assisted
dying. Should it be patient choice, irreversibility of the disease condition
and unbearable quality of life as decision-making criteria, or should impending
death be added as another necessary condition. The former arguably gels with
the ‘my life, my body, my choice’ attitude that drove most of the political
campaigns that led to the societal changes mentioned earlier. Historians of
bioethics will hopefully keep a
watchful eye on these developments.

Monday, July 18, 2016

I'm afraid the list isn't quite complete as for some reason at least one well-known quality publication, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, just doesn't pop up. It's also the case that some journals that were covered in the past have disappeared from google's radar, even though they continue to exist. This info from google's media release might explain the inclusion and exclusion of particular journals: 'Publications with fewer than 100 articles in 2011-2015, or publications that received no citations over these years are not included.'

Quite possibly the below table will be displayed in odd ways on your screen, mea culpa. Usual CoI blurb applies. I co-edit two of the journals in this list. List up-dated July 2016.

*h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2010-2014 have at least h citations each

**h5-median for a publication is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index

Monday, June 13, 2016

Canadians debate currently where to draw the line in the sand in terms of eligibility criteria for medical aid in dying. The federal government is determined to push thru a bill that is uncontroversially unconstitutional by limiting access to terminally ill patients.

Today the Globe and Mail (a paper that supports our government's restrictive approach to medical aid in dying) published an unusually thoughtful commentary by Konrad Yakabuski in support (you won't be surprised to hear) of said restrictive approach.

Yakabuski and I have something in common, something important. We both lived thru the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we both lost loved ones to the disease. Yakabuski mentions that his brother and several friends of his died of the ravages of AIDS, 'with dignity, the old-fashioned way'. Yakakuski's main point (a very reasonable point) is that eventually treatments for HIV infection came about that permit HIV infected individuals today to live basically healthy lives. If medical aid in dying would have been available to them, some HIV infected patients may have chosen to end their lives prematurely, however, if they had decided to stick it out, they might have been able to hang on for long enough to benefit from the life preserving drug regimes that exist today. He then makes the same claim about anti-depressants (arguably he is terribly mistaken on that frontier, but that's unimportant for the purpose of his broader point, it doesn't rely on him being right on that count).

Well, I'm a gay man who has seen very many of his friends succumb to HIV infection in the same years that Yakabuski writes about, and I disagree entirely with his argument and his policy recommendations. You won't be able to see this response in the Globe and Mail, unfortunately, because the paper has been reduced to a propaganda vehicle for a restrictive assisted dying regime.

There has been some debate both among medical ethics people, but certainly also among HIV infected people about medical aid in dying, in the 1980s. One leading bioethics journal, the Hastings Center Report, published many years back a piece by my friend, the late Michael Callen, entitled 'If I have AIDS, then let me die now.' Michael had, of course, no intention whatsoever, to die on AIDS. In fact, years after he published his commentary he wrote a book called Surviving AIDS. Eventually he succumbed to the disease, shortly before life-preserving treatment regimes came onto the market. I have lost far too many friends like Michael.

But I digress, let's return to Yakabuski's commentary. Why would educated AIDS activists, like Michael, have written a commentary for a mainstream medical ethics journal in which they argued that they should be able to receive medical aid in dying when they thought their time had come? Simply put, it was about self-determination. Something maligned by Canadian anti-choice activists as 'autonomy fundamentalism' (not Yakabuski's words!). It was a choice for Michael to make for himself, not for me, not for government, it was his call to make.

The problem with timelines in this context is that we can never know whether, if at all, and when a successful treatment for a particular ailment comes onto the market. Yakabuski briefly mentions the horrible deterioration in health and quality of life HIV infected people in those days experienced. It was worse than that, they had seen friends and lovers wither away, they knew what was coming their way. It's all nice and well to describe this withering away as 'dignified and old-fashioned', but frankly, for many of these young people who died during those years there was nothing dignified about their dying, and no amount of hand-holding and caring would have made their disintegrating lives any more dignified. I am deeply troubled about the euphemisms Yakabuski deploys to describe what was actually happening in our community. I also have no doubt that that is how he subjectively experienced or remembers his brother's death. It is not an experience that is representative of how dying of HIV was experienced by many, if not most, of those who died in those years.

The question then, surely, is whether these patients were entitled to call it a day when they decided they had enough, or whether the state had any right (as the Liberal government's legislation proposes) to force them to stick around and deny them access to medical aid in dying on the ground that some drug might come about. My answer: Of course they were entitled to make those choices and see those choices respected and supported. That the state would think it has a role to play in forcing such patients to stick around no matter what, or commit suicide by some gruesome means, is just mind boggling.

HIV is different to depression, of course, in that it was actually an illness where death would have been reasonably foreseeable, so HIV patients arguably would have met the standard set out in the restrictive government draft legislation of bill C14.

I have published a year ago with Suzanne van de Vathorst a lengthy piece on treatment resistant depression and medical aid in dying. May be take a minute or two to read it. It's available here. The same link will also take you to published responses, including one or two making Yakabuski's case, as well as our considered response to those arguments. The article also supplies hard data on the actual large scale failure of available treatment modalities that Yakabuski glosses over in his piece. The argument here is the same as above, if a patient is competent at the time of decision-making and he or she does not consider their lives worth living, and available treatment options have been exhausted, we as a society have no right whatsoever to force such people to stick around in the hope that some treatment might come about during their lifetime. It's a decision only such patients can make for themselves. Whatever they decide, they deserve our support.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

I have explained on this blog (just see the entry below) how Canada's Liberal government's draft legislation aims to deprive Canadians who are not terminally ill, but who are eligible for medical aid in dying, of their Charter rights. A fairly large number of constitutional law experts, including the lead counsel in the Carter case that led to the Supreme Court judgment, warned the federal government that its legislation would be contested in the courts and would eventually be thrown out by the Supreme Court. Government apparently thought it could thumb its nose at the judgement by redefining clear Supreme Court of Canada criteria and pretending that black is kinda white. Since then two Canadian courts have heard cases where competent patients who are not terminally ill appealed to receive medical aid in dying. Government lawyers in both cases were sent packing and told in no uncertain terms that their insistence on the eligibility standards expressed in the draft legislation is unacceptable because these standards are unconstitutional

Yesterday the Canadian Senate weighed in and removed the terminal illness threshold the Liberals were so keen on, precisely because the majority of Senators realised that the legislation proposed by the federal government is unconstitutional. Our Justice Minister meanwhile insists that her (unconstitutional) 'balance' is just right, and waffles a bit about not further defined 'vulnerable' people that would be best 'protected' if her government's proposed restrictive regime was passed by the Senate. It's only mildly amusing that she deploys the same vacuous rhetoric here that the previous Conservative government deployed.

The question is why the Liberals would engage in that sort of thing. There are persistent rumours that there are a fairly large number of religious conservatives in the Liberal caucus who care more about their religious beliefs then about Canadians' constitutional rights. This in turn forced the Trudeau government to try to legislate hard-right on this issue, to the dismay of virtually every relevant legal expert in the country. What does surprise is that these folks seem to think that their personal beliefs somehow trump their obligation to legislate in line with our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in line with the criteria the Supreme Court spelled out.

Friday, April 22, 2016

It is becoming clearer by the day that our newly elected federal government has an insatiable appetite for talking progressive while governing conservative. I suspect this will be our new normal until election time. The behaviour pattern is obvious. I doubt Mr Trudeau's feel-good activism on that frontier will carry the Liberals much longer. Canadians are catching on to them.Anyhow, as a quick reminder, the Canadian Supreme Court declared that parts of the Criminal Code that criminalize assisted dying are unconstitutional.Canada's Liberal government introduced its legislation on assisted dying in parliament. It is being debated in committee today.Here's the legislative draft proposal

A person has a grievous and irremediable medical condition if

(a) they have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability;

(b) they are in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability;

(c) that illness, disease or disability or that state of decline causes them enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable; and

(d) their natural death has become reasonably foreseeable, taking into account all of their medical circumstances, without a prognosis necessarily having been made as to the specific length of time that they have remaining.

Compare that to the Supreme Court's criteria:'‘competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.'Ii is trivially true that 'd' in the legislative draft is too restrictive, given the criteria the Court has set. Terminal illness is not a defensible threshold condition for access. Patients do not have to be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability either. Excluding not terminally ill patients from access who meet the above mentioned Supreme Court criteria would clearly violate Canadians' Charter rights. Government released today its rationale for the proposed policy. Here we go,Restricting access to only those individuals whose death is reasonably foreseeable allows them to choose a peaceful, medically assisted death where their medical circumstances are such that the dying process would otherwise be painful, distressing, frightening, prolonged or otherwise lacking dignity from their perspective. This approach respects autonomy during the passage to death, while otherwise prioritizing respect for human life and the equality of all people regardless of illness, disability or age. It also furthers the objective of suicide prevention and the protection of the vulnerable. Recognizing the complexity of the legal and social issues associated with medical assistance in dying, this approach strikes an appropriate balance between the competing rights, interests and values.

It's plain for everyone to see that the Rationale is not actually a rationale as it does not explain at all why terminal illness is introduced as an eligibility threshold. The Justice department's briefing acknowledges the problem, it states,This could impact the section 7 Charter rights of those who are suffering intolerably as a result of a serious and incurable condition, but whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable. This could include individuals suffering only from a mental illness, and individuals with physical disabilities who lack the physical capacity to end their own lives. Persons with mental illness or disabilities would only have access to medical assistance in dying if they meet all of the eligibility criteria.And yet, our government (lacking a rationale to actually respond to this concern), pushes ahead anyway. I trust you will savour the Catholic language introduced in the rationale, where government prioritizes 'respect for human life' over our Charter right to make decisions about our continuing existence based on competent, autonomous choice and our actual quality of life. Intractable human suffering is apparently of no concern to the Liberals. Go figure. Truly, this is legislation the Harper Conservatives could have drafted.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Stefan Eriksson at Uppsala University and his colleague Gert Helgesson at the Karolinska Institute have undertaken the commendable job of creating two lists of English language bioethics journals, one featuring journals published by reputable publishers and another one featuring journals associated with other publishing outfits. Each of their critical choices is accompanied by links providing evidence in support of their concerns about the journals/publishers in question. It is doubtful that some of the questionable journals actually qualify as journals in any meaningful way. There is one such journal, for instance, that published a full one article in its three years of existence. The wonders of fee-for-upload open access publishing...

The list created by Ericsson and Helgesson should prove to be tremendously useful as a guide for junior faculty who wonder where to submit their first academic outputs for peer review, but it's also helpful to those of us who have been around for longer and are asked to provide sound publishing advice that goes beyond guessing the quality of particular journals.

Not unexpectedly, the list isn't quite complete, even as far as English language journals are concerned (e.g. the superb Indian Journal of Medical Ethics is missing in action), but it's a great start, and undoubtedly future iterations of the list will move closer to comprehensiveness. The list also does not aim to include journals other than English language journals. It's probably a fair enough approach as it would be a mammoth task indeed to check whether particular journal titles in other languages fall into one or the other category of publications.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Canada's Liberal government introduced its legislation on assisted dying in parliament. There's a lot to talk about there, but let me focus on the government's most brazen ignoring of the eligibility criteria the Court has established.Here's the legislative draft proposal

A person has a grievous and irremediable medical condition if

(a) they have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability;

(b) they are in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability;

(c) that illness, disease or disability or that state of decline causes them enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable; and

(d) their natural death has become reasonably foreseeable, taking into account all of their medical circumstances, without a prognosis necessarily having been made as to the specific length of time that they have remaining.

Compare that to the Supreme Court's criteria:

'‘competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.'

I'm sure even lay persons appreciate that 'd' in the legislative draft is simply too restrictive, given the criteria the Court has set. Terminal illness is not a defensible threshold condition for access. Patients do not have to be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability either. Excluding not terminally ill patients from access who meet the above mentioned Supreme Court criteria would clearly violate Canadians' Charter rights. Apparently that is of no concern to our government.

To cut a long story short, if this becomes law, a Charter challenge will occur sooner rather than later, and the matter will be fixed in the Court. It is shocking that a Liberal government would continue the Harper government's tradition of trying to subvert Supreme Court decisions.

Friday, April 01, 2016

I will be on the road a bit during the next few weeks, giving various talks in various places. In case you happen to be around, say 'hi' :).

I will be in Charleston, SC between April 6-8 to give a talk on the Ethics of Catastrophically Ill Patients Access to Unregistered Medical Interventions as part of the Thomas Pitts Memorial Lectureship in Medical Ethics at the Medical University of South Carolina.

From April 11-13 I will be at Williams College, MA to give a talk on the Ethics of Catastrophically Ill Patients Access to Unregistered Medical Interventions in the context of the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014/15. I will also run a seminar on intractable depression and assisted dying there.

From May 9-11 I will be at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, giving talks on the Ethics of Catastrophically Ill Patients Access to Unregistered Medical Interventions and on why I think there should be no conscientious objection accommodation for doctors in liberal democracies.

From May 12-14 I will be attending the Euthanasia 2016 congress in the Netherlands, offering a presentation on the current state of play in Canada (on a panel with Margaret Battin), as well as a presentation on intractable depression and assisted dying.

So, if you happen to be in the vicinity and you always meant to say 'hi', don' hesitate.

Friday, March 04, 2016

A kerfuffle has broken out in
the Canadian news media about eligibility criteria for assisted dying. The
Supreme Court of Canada in its decision is unequivocal
that limiting access to include only people who are about to die would be
violating the Charter rights of other patients. Here are the core criteria the
Court set, an eligible person would be a ‘competent
adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a
grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or
disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the
individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.’ It is uncontroversial
then that terminal illness cannot be a viable access threshold for the purpose
of upcoming federal as well as provincial-territorial legislation. That hasn’t
stopped constitutional ‘experts’ like Margaret Wente, a notorious
columnist at the Globe and Mail to insist on just that.
Experts celebrated in her piece include Harvey Chochinov, an anti-euthanasia
activist appointed in the dying days of the Harper government to advise him on
how to act on the Supreme Court judgment. Chochinov acted as a witness for the
Harper government’s side during the trial. His evidence, obviously, did not
convince the trial judge and her decision was upheld in what was a unanimous
decision going against everything Chochinov argued for. It is no surprise that
Wente, a writer not known for good judgment, celebrates Harper’s appointee on
her Globe and Mail platform.

The Globe and Mail ran no less than at least three
opinion pieces arguing that a
parliamentary special joint committee as well as a provincial-territorial expert
advisory group got it wrong when they included for instance people with intractable
depression among those eligible for access to assisted dying. So, here’s a
quick few notes on Wente. She writes that 110 psychiatric patients have been ‘euthanized’
in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2014. The journal article she refers to actually
notes that these were cases of euthanasia or assisted suicide, ie it is not the
case that 110 patients were actually euthanized. Small difference in Ms Wente’s
fantasy land.

Another highlight from Wente land, ‘The rationale [in the parliamentary committee report, U, Sch.] is
that psychiatric patients should have the same rights as everybody else.’ Well,
in Canada we have this little document called the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, and when we take a closer look at it, we will realise that competent
psychiatric patients have the same rights as competent people who are not
psychiatric patients. Labelling someone ‘psychiatric patient’ doesn’t
miraculously do away with their Charter rights! Apparently the Globe and Mail
does not have funding any longer for basic fact checking of the content the
writers generate for its opinion columns.

Wente eventually claims that
the numbers of psychiatric patients seeing their lives ended by assisted dying are
growing fast. This is doubtful, given that the overwhelming majority of
requests for assistance in dying from psychiatric patients are denied in the
Netherlands. 2013 saw an increase in cases of euthanasia for patients with
psychiatric illnesses. A total of 42 cases were reported—as is legally
required—to the Dutch Euthanasia Review Committee. The 42 cases reported in
2013 compare against 12 in 2012. Of these 42 cases, 32 were investigated by the
Committee in 2013 and the findings published. In 22 of these 32 cases, depression
was mentioned as (one of the) the cause(s) of suffering. This brief, intermittent increase in cases is probably mostly
due to the start of the ‘end-of-life’ clinic, an organisation that aims to
grant euthanasia to all of, and only, those who fulfil the due care criteria in
the Netherlands but who have been unable to obtain assisted dying from their
physician. The start of this service in March 2012 led to a significant number
of applications from patients who were determined to end their life by means of
assisted dying, among them were a large number of patients with psychiatric
illnesses (38% of applicants). Some 62% of these patients with psychiatric
illnesses were refused an assisted death mostly because their death wish was
judged to be more or less impulsive, and therefore did not meet the Dutch due
care criteria. The Dutch Minister of Justice revealed in August 2014 in a letter to the Dutch Parliament
that there were no signs of a further increase in 2014. Meanwhile, in Canada, Ms Wente claims as a fact
dramatic increases in the numbers of psychiatric patients being euthanized. You
need to do that, when all you have are 110 cases over a fair number of years, that
don’t quite sustain claims of slippery slopes and out of control actions by laissez
faire doctors. A number of those patients whose requests were denied eventually
committed suicide by other means, a not uncommon occurrence among people with
intractable depression. Among this small number (ie 110 people over a 4 year
period in a country of about 17 million people) of psychiatric patients, the
authors of the study that Wente goes on and on about in her column, looked more
closely at only 66 of those cases, slightly more than half. It turns out that the
majority of those cases consisted of patients suffering from depression. That
is highly significant, because there are good reasons to make intractably
depressed people (who can be assessed for competence and, because they are not
imminently dying, for the endurance of their wish to die) eligible for access
to assisted dying. I have published
last year a journal article, co-authored by Professor Suzanne van de
Vathorst, MD PhD, of Erasmus University Medical School in which we make the
ethical case for why such people should be eligible for access to assisted dying,
provided certain sensible safeguards are met.

Trudo Lemmens, a law
professor at the University of Toronto has published two pieces in the Globe
and Mail – apparently the ideological headquarter for this sort of activism.
Not content with that, he published yet another piece (with more or less
similar content) at the Impact
Ethics website. I shall focus on the piece he has published there. Lemmens
essentially has the same concerns that drive Wente and relies on the same
evidence. He claims, ‘The [Canadian
parliamentary, U. Sch.] Committee ignores the Court’s emphasis on the narrow
basis of its ruling and the exclusion of “euthanasia for minors or persons with
psychiatric disorders”. I encourage you to do a search for this quote in
the SCC
judgment and you’ll see
that the Court actually did nothing of the kind. Nowhere does it exclude competent
patients with psychiatric disorders from access to assisted dying. It’s plainly
obvious already from the access criteria I began with, so Lemmens is using bits
and pieces from rejected expert testimony to make his case. To be absolutely
clear on this subject: there is no exclusion of competent psychiatric patients
writ large in the Supreme Court of Canada judgment. Lemmens and Wente might not
like it, but it is what it is.

Lemmens uses the same study that
excites Wente to make the case that the Netherlands and Belgium have gone down
a slippery slope that we would end up on if we made assisted dying available to
patients who are not terminally ill. It is worth noting that the Supreme Court
in its judgment explicitly rejects that line of reasoning. It writes, ‘The regime [in Belgium,
U. Sch.] simply regulates a common pre-existing practice. In the absence
of a comparable history in Canada, the trial judge concluded that it was
problematic to draw inferences about the level of physician compliance with
legislated safeguards based on the Belgian evidence (para. 680).’ In any case,
the study that is used by Wente and Lemmens to show how far down the slippery
slope the Netherlands has gone, relies on the interpretation of
66 cases, of which the majority were patients with depressive disorder. Its
authors conclude, ‘The granting of their EAS
requests appears to involve considerable physician judgment, usually involving
multiple physicians who do not always agree (sometimes without independent
psychiatric input), but the euthanasia review committees generally defer to the
judgments of the physicians performing the EAS.’ The important bit here is that
requests for assistance in dying made by psychiatric patients involves
considerable physician judgment, usually involving multiple doctors. That
doesn’t look like powerful evidence of a country gone down the slippery slope
to terrible abusive practices.

Lemmens eventually resorts to
anecdotes from TV documentaries. We apparently have to take his word for it
that the cases he describes are uncontroversial examples of abuse. It is my
understanding that those who provided assistance in dying to the patients
featured in the documentaries do not agree with Lemmens, so perhaps the story
told by those who oppose the practice might be a tad bit on the biased side of
things.

Remarkably, the Globe and
Mail refused to allow for critical responses to these commentary style pieces.
Because false claims were made in these pieces about supposedly terrible things
happening to vulnerable mentally ill people in Belgium I asked an actual
expert, Professor Jan Bernheim, MD PhD of the University of Brussels
End-of-Life Care Research Group in its Faculty of Medicine for a reply to these
diatribes. He kindly agreed to do so. It is noteworthy that the Globe and Mail
chose not to publish his reply. At least a brief letter from the chairpersons
of the provincial-territorial expert advisory group correcting the most
flagrant errorin one of the
Globe and Mail pieces was published.

Contributions such as Wente’s and Lemmens’ do a
disservice to the debate on what kind of regulatory regime we should introduce
in Canada. Their campaign is difficult to understand, especially given the very
small number of cases (anecdotes, to be frank) that opponents of a permissive
regime rely on. I wonder whether it’s due to their inability to appreciate the
suffering that many competent patients with intractable psychiatric disorders
encounter throughout their lives. Or do they simply believe that such patients
should just ‘stick it out’? The existential suffering patients with depression
encounter, and that patients with intractable depression experience throughout
their lives is equal to the most severe physical ailments. Empirical evidence
from a large-scale study suggests that intensity
of mental suffering, on average, is equal only to the most severe physical
conditions. (Bernheim
JL, Theuns P, Mazaheri M, Hofmans J, Fliege H, M.Rose. The Potential of
Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment (ACSA) to Reduce Bias in the Measurement
of Subjective Well-Being Journal of Happiness Studies. 2006;7(2):227-250.)

Several comprehensive
surveys of assisted dying regimes across Europe as well as the Netherlands in
particular concluded that there is no evidence that these permissive regimes
put the vulnerable at increased risk. It is remarkable that that evidence is
studiously ignored by campaigners like Wente and Lemmens. They are playing to
public concerns about vulnerable psychiatric patients. We should be concerned
about the suffering of many psychiatric patients, but the reality is that
today, with the best available treatments, a large percentage of these patients
do not consider their lives worth living. A few of those patients would avail
themselves of assistance in dying. They are entitled to receive assistance once it has been established that they are competent to make that decision and
once it is clear that their wish remains stable over time. The Supreme Court of
Canada, in its wise decision on this subject matter heard evidence and concerns
along the lines presented by Wente and Lemmens and concluded that we will be
able to design a permissive regulatory regime that does not put psychiatric
patients at risk, the same conclusion was reached by the parliamentary
committee as well as the provincial-territorial expert panel in their
respective reports. That is reassuring. I hope the upcoming governmental
regulations both federally and provincially will be in line with the Supreme
Court’s criteria and do not arbitrarily exclude competent patients with
intractable illnesses that render their lives not worth living to them.